Project 2025, the well-known conservative playbook of the Heritage Foundation, promises to overhaul the majority of the federal government under a second Trump administration. Considering all this, the prospect sparked fear and concern from voters even if the former president tried to distance his campaign from the plan.
Too little too late, Mr. Trump. As Project 2025 might seem a bit radical, most of it is not new. Instead, the now-famous document seeks to reanimate a good portion of some of the worst, most racial, economic, and political instincts of the Reagan Revolution.
Project 2025 starts with its authors (out of which one stepped down last month) who are perpetually boasting the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 publication “The Mandate for Leadership.” In the past, all of this helped shape the Reagan administration’s policy framework.
Naturally, it hit its mark, as Reagan wrote 60% of his recommendations into public policy in his first year in office, according to the Foundation itself.
However, the 900-plus-page Project 2025, a huge component of a new edition of “The Mandate for Leadership,” doesn’t contain any kind of analysis of the economic and social price Americans had to pay for the revolution the Heritage Foundation and Reagan inspired.
Considering today’s economic inequality, racial unrest, and on top of everything, environmental degradation, and seeing all of these for what they are, meaning our greatest political challenges, it would help to remember that Reagan and the Heritage Foundation were the preeminent engineers of such catastrophes.
In fact, not a single day in Reagan’s presidency embodied this type of transformative policy or, in fact, the political ambitions of the Heritage Foundation more efficiently than on August 13, 1981, when Reagan signed his first budget.
This budget dramatically transforms governmental priorities and also hollows out the nation’s 50-year pursuit of government for the common good that was initiated during the New Deal. As soon as it was passed, it stripped 400,000 poor working families of their welfare benefits, while also removing a significant amount of provisions from another 300,000.
Moreover, radical cuts in education targeted no less than 26 million students. The number of poor Americans increased by a whopping 2.2 million, and the percentage of Black Americans living in poverty increased to a staggering 34.2%.
Naturally, this was only the beginning of Reagan’s war on the poor, the environment, and education. According to the Heritage Foundation’s plan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s operating budget would drastically fall by 27%, and its science budget would decrease by over 50%.
Funding for these programs by the Department of Housing and Urban Development which also provided housing assistance would be instantly cut by 70%, according to Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, By America.” Homelessness skyrocketed as well.
As Project 2025 proposed, Reagan tried to eliminate the Department of Education, but he nevertheless settled for gutting its entire funding in such a manner that only did more harm. What do we mean by that?
Well, it set public education on a course that was already taken, 100 years prior. As funding for such issues dived under Reagan, financial support for the “war on drugs” also skyrocketed and the prison population doubled in numbers.
At the same time, protections provided to the wealthy skyrocketed. Here are a couple of examples: tax rates on personal income, corporate revenue, and capital gains all plummeted. For instance, the highest income tax rate when Reagan took office was 70%.
He would soon lower it to 33%. To make sure that wealth would be long-lived family entitlement, Reagan decided to institute a 300% increase in inheritance tax protections through estate tax exemptions in his first budget.
Back in 1980, the exemption stood at no less than $161,000. So by the time Reagan left office back in 1989, it reached $600,000. Nowadays, it is $13,610,000. This basically means that nowadays, almost all wealthy children enjoy tax-free access to generational wealth.
During Reagan’s presidency, at least in the beginning, the sheer number of millionaires and billionaires doubled, increasing 225% and 400%, respectively. At the same time, the poverty of Americans across various racial lines increased. Surprisingly or not, even white males were in financial trenches after his presidency.
The paradox of it all is that even if, allegedly, the U.S. is the wealthiest nation in the world, today, poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death in America. So if we get the impression that we live somewhere where you can’t do anything as long as you’re not wealthy, there are a few reasons why that might be.
Looking back at Reagan’s era and the Heritage Foundation’s original “Mandate for Leadership”, we also need to remember that our domestic wounds are mainly self-inflicted, and they represent the results of buying into racial, economic, and environmental lies that keep being sold to us.
It is exactly why these types of policies that created so much damage in the past are now sought once more. Maybe the only thing that’s truly new about Project 2025 is its plan to use more authoritarian means to enact its agenda.
History has its own hinges, including moments that simply shake up the trajectory of some countries. The greatest progress we made always emerged during the most difficult times. It is up to the United States’ most committed patriots to close the door to such terror and trauma and allow for new, fresher beginnings packed with democratic possibilities.
Our current moment represents more than just a simple election. It’s also a turning point that has the potential to transform America for many generations forward. We don’t even need the version of the past that Project 2025 tries to sell us.
It didn’t work for many of us back then, and most definitely it won’t work now. However, Project 2025 may be the kind of push that democracy needs. As the Republican Party sprints towards authoritarianism, Democrats ought to be equally determined to develop a fairly equitable democracy and bind the wounds of a deeply divided nation.
Trump’s Vice-President nominee loudly praises Project 2025
According to Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, “JD Vance is the embodiment of MAGA, with his out-of-touch extreme agenda and plans to help Trump kickstart the Project agenda.” However, other Republican representatives continuously state they are not completely on the same page about what should happen in a second Trump term.
Some of the recommendations you’ll find on the project, including further taxes on tips are somehow in opposition to what Trump has pledged on the campaign trail. It also proposes changes to Medicare, a program Trump promised to protect. Trump’s campaign also stressed that he will make decisions on what he does after he returns in the Oval Office.
While Vance doesn’t specifically mention Project 2025 in his foreword, he is notably a call for revolution and makes a couple of crazy parallels to Kevin Roberts. To hide these fine remarks, Trump’s campaign initiated a series of public attacks on the project, attacks which seem to have paid off: the project is shuttering its policy operations, and its director, Paul Dans, has decided to step down.
According to Trump’s campaign, “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be very welcomed and should represent a notice to anyone or any group that tries to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign – that it won’t end well for you.”
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